Insight: Mobile phone crime

Mobile phones remain the number one target of muggers, and police insist the mobile industry could do more.

Met chiefs have a shopping list of measures they are convinced would cut crime if put into place, including:

Demanding a name and address from everybody who buys a pre-paid mobile, to assemble a central register

Ending all possibility of "cloning" numbers with a register which matches phone numbers to handsets

Making stolen handsets useless throughout the world, not just in Britain

Stressing the safety features of phones when they are sold

Senior officers have praised steps already taken by the industry, including backing a stolen-phone intelligence unit. But organised crime gangs are still exploiting the fact that stolen phones can be used by buying them from robbers and shipping them abroad to sell.

However, Scotland Yard believes it has been "significantly successful" in reducing muggings, at a time when the number of phones in circulation has soared.